My boomers are generally distrustful of government, but it's taken this stupid balloon story for my dad (ex-Navy) to see how flagrantly fake the media is.
For the unitiated, if the balloon thing was real you'd never have heard about it... It's have been dealt with probably before reaching out airspace.
One of many purposes of this Balloon Op is likely gathering Intel on how people react and to gauge what impact Regime influencers and Trump influencers have and on whom plus mapping their networks.
Obviously both the Regime and Team Trump are gathering that Intel.
Another malign purpose may be to normalize these "Sky Events" so normies don't freak out until its too late when real ones occur. By "real" I mean deadly, no matter who is responsible or scapegoated.